Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Meyer's Orts online, and FREE!

Ancestry has put Meyers Orts online, searchable, and FREE! This is they way they describe it:

This database contains Meyers Geographical and Commercial Gazetteer of the German Empire (or Meyers Orts- und Verkehrs-Lexikon des Deutschen Reichs in German). [One can] use it to locate place names in German research. ...Originally compiled in 1912; this is the gazetteer to use because it includes all areas that were part of the pre-World War I (WWI) German Empire. Gazetteers published after WWI may not include parts of the Empire that were lost to bordering countries. Overall, this gazetteer includes more than 210,000 cities, town, hamlets, villages, etc.

Thanks to Barbara A. H. Nuehring who reported this exciting resource to the Pfalz list, saying, "it is not the easiest resource to use, but worth every minute of working your way through it. What is really nice about the digital image is that you don't need a magnifying glass -- you can zoom in to read the information about the town/village."

Barbara adds, "How to Use the Meyers Gazetteer and Handwriting Guide: German Gothic are FHL Research Guides in PDF format that can be downloaded from http://www.familysearch.org. And of course, it is also helpful to have a German-English dictionary close at hand."

Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. - Jim Rohn